In recent years, media consumption has dramatically increased. This has resulted in a rapid increase in available media content. Consequently, consumers of the media have to select from a large array of available media content. However, there is no easy mechanism for making this selection.
Consumers of textual data have a much better experience than media consumers due to the availability of summaries, snippets, keywords, etc. For example, short summaries of large textual content provide users with an abstract of the content. This allows the user to rapidly select the articles/web pages to read.
In contrast, media consumers have to sort through the actual footage of the media before selecting a suitable media (or a portion of the media) to watch. For example, in a typical media player, a consumer must use the forward button to play the media stream at a faster frame rate, which mutes the audio channel. Further, the user may want to watch only a certain portion of the media stream, e.g., the financial summary in a news feed so that he can judge whether the financial news is worth watching. However, the user is likely to be frustrated because of the difficulty in identifying the appropriate relevant portion(s) of the media stream and the level of necessity (such as the level of desirability or urgency) to watch the media stream to get the needed summary. Such ineffective means introduce inefficiencies in media selection and effective consumption, and therefore, result in a degraded user experience.
In other words, consumers of media would like to control if, when, and how to watch media. For example, consumers would like to decide how to watch the media once consumption starts (temporal, special navigation, etc. to navigate to most wanted portions of the video content).